J.J.C. Smart

Ockhamist Comments on

Strawson

Despite admiration for his brilliant rhetoric and his ontological seri-

ousness, I am very much opposed to Galen Strawson’s panpsychism

or even to what he calls ‘micropsychism’. He calls himself a real

physicalist but from my point of view he is not really a physicalist. He

holds that ‘experiences’ should count as a primitive term of the vocab-

ulary of physics. This, to me but not to him, smells a bit like what

Russell called the advantage of theft over honest toil (Russell, 1919,

p. 71). Still, I do not deny that experiences exist. I believe that

experiences are brain processes and since brain processes exist so

must the relevant experiences. What I deny is that experiences have

non-physical properties (qualia). Let us say that the experience of see-

ing a red tomato involves having a red sense datum. The experience is

not red. It is just the sort of experience that I have when a red tomato is

before my eyes, illuminated in bright sunlight. What I deny is that

experiences have (in my sense) non-physical qualities. (There may be

a sensible sense of ‘quale’ used by cognitive scientists whereby a

quale is a point on a similarity space or something like that but I shall

ignore this because it is obviously harmless to my sort of physicalist.)

Strawson has his use of ‘physicalism’ because he simply adds on

‘experience’ to the terms of physicalism. His use of the word ‘experi-

ence’ does not fit into physics in the way that ‘brain process’ does.

There are physical and chemical theories of nerve transmission and of

how neurons behave like switching devices and so on. Nothing like

that with qualia.

It seems that in philosophy there are rarely knock-down arguments

(Smart, 1993). So though Strawson’s speculations seem bizarre to me

I do not aspire to convince him, though if I do so much the better. The

reason why there are hardly ever completely knock-down arguments,

except between very like minded philosophers, is that philosophers,

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13, No. 10–11, 2006, pp. 158–62

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unlike chemists and geologists, are licensed to question everything,

including methodology. There are even philosophers who question

the law of non-contradiction, and bizarre though this may seem to

most of us, one can admire the way that they develop a dialethic logic

which prevents the denial of the law of non-contradiction from

trivializing proof. Of course, in philosophy knock-down argument

may be possible when there is already a fair amount of agreement

between the proponents. Failing this we may end by trading off

plausibilities. Even this may not work and we end up with a restrained

(no cheap debating tricks allowed) rhetoric and there is no doubt that

Strawson is a fine rhetorician.

One mistake that I see in Strawson is that he is too empiricist. In

claiming knowledge of the properties of experience he can get into

disastrous metaphysics. One must remember Mach and the logical

positivists who tried to reduce this great universe of ours to actual and

possible sense data. I do not mean to say that Strawson is reductionist in

the way Mill (who said that matter is a permanent possibility of sensa-

tion) or the logical positivists were. Indeed quite the reverse. But

about the nature of experience he is like them in being too empiricist.

In some respects F.H. Bradley had a better epistemology of science

than had Mill. We need elements of a coherence theory of knowledge

(but emphatically not of truth).

For lack of space I cannot give a full defence of my position, nor

would it be appropriate here to do so, but I will indicate why I think

differently and why others should think more or less in my way and

differently from Strawson. In particular we should be very suspicious

of intuition and of phenomenology. I use this last word in the sensible

way that Strawson might (see the second paragraph of his 2006 article)

and not as the name of a school of unintelligible German philosophers.

In physics we test our theories by experiment and observation.

However it would be wrong to say that we test them by our experi-

ences. We test them by experiment and observation. Let us adopt

David Armstrong’s account of perception as coming to believe by

means of the senses (Armstrong, 1993). Unimportantly for present

purposes he came to prefer to talk of information rather than belief.

We come to believe about the blue and white bird on the gatepost, not

about our experience. On the higher order theory of consciousness

developed by Armstrong, Rosenthal, Lycan and others we can per-

ceive without consciousness, that is, we can be on ‘automatic pilot’

and aware of events, for example a car approaching us on the wrong

side of the road, but not be aware of our awareness We can think of

consciousness as awareness of awareness. We can think of the second

OCKHAMIST COMMENTS ON STRAWSON 159

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order awareness as the coming to believe by one part of our brain

about a process in another part of our brain. Since the brain is part of

our body, Armstrong has compared inner sense with kinesthesis. The

awareness of the awareness is not awareness of a quale. The bird on

the gatepost may be blue and white, but not our experience of it. In this

sort of way I would deny the existence of any (for me mysterious)

qualia. The understanding of experience will come from neurosci-

ence, not from inner sense.

Nearly fifty years ago I used the words ‘topic neutral’ to denote

neutrality between materialism and dualism. I borrowed the words

from Gilbert Ryle, who had used them in a more general sense. Ryle

used them to denote logical words such as ‘if’, ‘and’, ‘not’, ‘all’, ‘be-

cause’. If you heard only such words in a conversation you would

have no idea of the topic of discourse. In my restricted sense the neu-

trality is between dualism and materialism or physicalism (in my

sense of the latter word, not Strawson’s). The topic neutral idea is

absolutely vital to the identity theory of mind (Smart, 1999). Since

otherwise we would be landed with property dualism. I believe that

Strawson with his extended sense of ‘physical’ conceals this. Some

people think that the identity theory has been supplanted by function-

alism, but there is little ontological difference between them since

most functionalists would be happy to say that the categorical bases of

the functional states and processes are purely physical brain states and

processes.

What needs to be done now is to discuss Strawson’s appeal to phe-

nomenology. His qualities of experience seem to me to be the same as

properties of what used to be called ‘sense data’ or of mental images.

Having a mental image is the brain putting itself through similar

motions that occur in having a sense datum: it is a sort of pretence see-

ing. Now a brain process cannot be red, white and blue as is a union

jack. One might talk of a red, white and blue sense datum, but I con-

tend that there are no such thing as sense data and mental images.

There is only havings of them. The having of a red, white and blue

sense datum is the functionally described process that typically occurs

when a union jack is before the eyes of a normal human percipient in

clear light. ‘Normal human percipient’ can be defined without circu-

larity. Colours themselves are very disjunctive and idiosyncratic

physical properties of the surfaces of objects. Some easily made

epicycles have to be made to deal with such things as radiant light and

the colour of the sun at sunset. So anthropocentric and disjunctive,

probably of no interest to denizens of other planets elsewhere in the

universe. Maybe not quite as disjunctive as I thought since David R.

160 J.J.C. SMART

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Hilbert has argued for at least approximately identifying the colours

of surfaces with reflectances. Reflectances are well defined physical

properties (Hilbert, 1987). The above considerations enable me to

avoid phenomenology and provide what I contend is a much more

plausible alternative to Strawson’s speculations. In some ways

Strawson’s panpsychism reminds me of Whitehead’s Process and

Reality, for neither of them are the experiential properties ‘emergent’:

on the contrary they are universal. Like Strawson I distinguish a harm-

less sense of ‘emergence’ (which Strawson illustrates well with the

existence of liquidity) from a highly dubious sense of this word. The

ability of a radio to tune in the BBC is emergent in this harmless sense

(Smart, 1981). The functioning of the receiver can be explained by

physics plus wiring diagrams and the physics of the various compo-

nents. In the same way I regard the biochemical core of biology to be

physics and chemistry plus generalizations (not laws) of natural his-

tory, even though these generalizations of natural history may be

known only with sophisticated apparatus. C.D. Broad in his The Mind

and its Place in Nature, mentioned by Strawson, espoused the dubious

sense when he said that no amount of knowledge of the properties of

sodium and chloride would explain the properties of sodium chloride,

seemingly unaware that scientists were busy working on the theory of

the chemical bond. Strawson’s qualia have presumably always

existed and so in a temporal sense they cannot have emerged (though I

wonder about the milliseconds after the big bang) but in an atemporal

sense they might be thought to have emerged in the dubious sense of

this word.

A root of my disagreement with Strawson about the value of phe-

nomenology comes from my assertion of the topic neutrality of ordi-

nary talk about experience. In any case the notion of experience is

itself elusive (Farrell, 1950). We can certainly say that we have expe-

riences and I say that they are physical in my narrower sense of ‘physi-

cal’ with no need for Strawson’s extended sense of this word. There

can be metaphysical illusions (Smart, 2006; Armstrong, 1998). I hold

that for there to be a metaphysical illusion there must be in addition a

mistake in logic, but there must be a strong psychological pressure to

make it.

I apologise for so many references to my own ideas but I think that

the only way to criticize Strawson’s bold speculation is to indicate, if

only briefly, an alternative that may appeal to some readers as more

believable. I am not clear that I have sufficiently understood Strawson

and if I have not I expect that he will put me right in his Response.

OCKHAMIST COMMENTS ON STRAWSON 161

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References

Armstrong, D.M. (1968), ‘The headless woman illusion and the defence of materi-

alism’, Analysis, 29, pp. 48–9.

Armstrong, D.M. (1993), A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge).

Farrell, B.A. (1950), ‘Experience’, Mind, 59, pp. 170–98.

Hilbert, D.R. (1987), Color and Color Perception (Stanford, CA: CSLI).Russell, B. (1919), Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London: Allen and

Unwin).

Smart, J.J.C. (1981), ‘Physicalism and emergence’, Neuroscience, 6, pp. 109–13.Smart, J.J.C. (1993), ‘Why philosophers disagree’, in Reconstructing Philosophy:

New Essays on Meta Philosophy, ed. Jocylyne Couture and Kai Nielsen (Cal-

gary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press), pp. 67–82.Smart, J.J.C. (2000), ‘The identity theory of mind’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia

of Philosophy (on line).Smart, J.J.C. (2004), ‘Consciousness and awareness’, Journal of Consciousness

Studies, 11 (2), pp. 41–50.Smart, J.J.C. (2006), ‘Metaphysical illusions’, Australasian Journal of Philoso-

phy, 84, pp. 167–75.Strawson, G. (2006), ‘Realistic monism: Why physicalism entails panpsychism’,

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13 (10–11), pp. 3–31.

162 J.J.C. SMART

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